𝙰 𝙱𝚘𝚍𝚢 𝙼𝚊𝚍𝚎 𝚝𝚘 𝙿𝚊𝚢 𝚏𝚘𝚛 𝙷𝚒𝚜𝚝𝚘𝚛𝚢

𝚆𝚘𝚖𝚊𝚗 𝚄𝚗𝚔𝚗𝚘𝚠𝚗

𝙳𝚒𝚛𝚎𝚌𝚝𝚎𝚍 𝚋𝚢 𝙼𝚊𝚢 𝚎𝚕-𝚃𝚘𝚞𝚔𝚑𝚢

𝚅𝚎𝚗𝚒𝚌𝚎 𝟸𝟶𝟸𝟼

𝚃𝚒𝚏𝚏 𝟸𝟶𝟸𝟼

Written by Narges Samadi

Winner of the Golden Lion at the 2026 Venice Film Festival

Toronto International Film Festival 2026

A Body Made to Pay for History

Eighty years have passed since the end of the Second World War, and cinema has returned again and again to Nazism, occupation, concentration camps, mass killing, displacement, and the greatest catastrophes of that era. Yet one of the most important qualities of Woman Unknown, for me, is that May el-Toukhy, eighty years later, still finds an angle from which to look at the postwar period that does not simply repeat established narratives, but returns to a less-seen part of history: a history that remained not on the battlefield, but in the body, the home, class, memory, silence, and the everyday relationships of ordinary people.

This is less a film about the end of war than about what does not end when war officially does. The soldiers have gone, the flags have changed, and the streets have grown quiet, yet occupation can continue inside a woman’s body. The film’s power lies first in this screenwriting choice, and then in the director’s trust in the language of cinema. Rather than explaining history, el-Toukhy allows it to settle into architecture, objects, bodies, distances, clothes, and silences. The film moves forward with very little information, but this restraint does not mean an absence of meaning. On the contrary, the fewer explanatory elements there are, the more weight each detail carries, forcing the viewer to read the image itself.

This language is established from the very beginning. The first shots focus on the exterior architecture of a tall, severe building, a work of art on the wall, a piano at the center of the room, and a white dress hanging in an empty room. The building’s cold, rigid form, with its straight lines and heavy mass, reminded me of the institutional and authoritarian architecture of Nazi-era Europe.

This architecture creates a sense of order, control, and power before any person even enters the frame. In a film concerned with what remains in bodies after occupation, that first image already casts history's shadow over the house.

Before the characters tell us anything about themselves, these elements have already defined the film’s world. The house is affluent, orderly, and controlled, yet something within it feels suspended. The artwork, the piano, and the white dress are not merely signs of wealth; they are remnants of a woman no longer there, whose absence still shapes the home's emotional architecture.

The man confronts his wife's loss differently from Marie. On the surface, he changes the house, removes photographs, rearranges objects, and tries to construct a new image of “mother” for his daughter, but inwardly he remains attached to the memory of the woman he lost. He brings Marie into the house and sees in her face a resemblance to his former wife, a resemblance that gradually becomes an attempt to reconstruct an identity. Marie is expected to become not only a new wife, but also part of the void left by the girl’s mother.

The house therefore becomes a place where two different responses to loss collide. The man survives by preserving part of the past and rewriting another part; Marie survives by trying to erase her own past. He rearranges the house to make loss bearable; Marie rearranges herself so that she no longer has to be the woman she once was.

For me, Woman Unknown is fundamentally a film about four women—four women who gradually become two pairs of mirrors. In the central narrative, Marie and the woman next door are two women from different social positions, with two ambiguous pasts and two different ways of moving through the aftermath of occupation. Alongside them are two anonymous women whose hair is cut publicly in the postwar streets. These two women are not merely reenactments of a historical punishment; each becomes, in a way, an external image of one of the film’s two principal women.

The first woman, whom Marie sees in the street, struggles, screams, tries to escape, and refuses to let society write its verdict onto her body. But she cannot. Hands restrain her, and her hair is cut. Marie’s horror as she watches is not simply a reaction to the punishment of another woman; she sees her own possible fate. A woman who, through one sign, one rumour, or one exposure, can suddenly be pulled out of ordinary life and have her body turned into evidence of guilt.

The second woman, whose hair is cut later, behaves differently. She struggles less and stands more firmly. At first she holds herself with strength, breaks for a few moments, cries, and then gathers herself again.

More importantly, the scene lasts longer. The scissors return again and again, stretching out the punishment. For me, this second woman becomes a symbolic image of the woman next door—not because the film narratively identifies them as the same person, but because the editing, the body, and the scene's placement allow them to overlap. The first woman resembles Marie: terrified, fleeing, trying to survive. The second resembles the neighbour: more resistant, slower to break, and more able to conceal her past.

From this perspective, four women become two mirrors.

Here, one of the film’s most important formal decisions becomes clear: el-Toukhy compresses history into a few brief images and tightly edited cuts in several places, but she lengthens the punishment of a woman.

The doctor’s assassination passes through a few brief images of a disturbed space and cuts that seem to cast shadows over one another; a moment in a postwar bar can register the transition of an era through only a few movements and glances; the Danish flag sequence also compresses the passage from occupation to “liberation.” In all three cases, time is condensed through layered images. But when it comes to cutting a woman’s hair, time expands.

It is as if history can move forward in a few seconds, but the humiliation of a woman’s body must be fully seen.

The relationship between Marie and the woman next door is one of the film’s most complex layers. Each reads the other, and each understands that the woman opposite her is hiding something, but their circumstances are not equal. Marie must erase almost her entire past to remain in her new life. The neighbour, a writer, a mother, and someone of greater social and financial standing, has more room for silence. Her house, comfort, cigarettes, champagne, and the details of her lifestyle are not meaningless to Marie. Marie knows this world and knows how to read its signs.

The film never fully explains the truth about the neighbour, and that ambiguity matters. The point is not that we should be able to complete her case file, but that Marie gradually constructs a narrative about her—a narrative in which the other woman, too, was not entirely outside the world of occupation.

The fundamental difference between the two women is class. If both have a past that must be hidden, one has been able to keep it protected behind a house, money, education, and social position, while the other has paid for that same past on her body. This is where the film reveals one of the postwar period's bitterest contradictions.

The factory owner can explain his economic cooperation with the Germans in the language of business, necessity, and preservation. At the same time, a woman’s contact with the same occupying force can become a stigma that must be written onto her body.

The man keeps his factory; the woman loses her hair. One hides his past in accounts; the other is forced to carry hers on her head, skin, and body.

This logic of ownership over a woman’s body is not limited to society or to the victorious forces after the war. Marie’s former boyfriend also still believes he has a certain right to her body. Even his condition for staying away from her life is tied to a demand upon that same body:

“Give me what you gave the Germans.”

For me, this is one of the film's cruellest lines. In that sentence, Marie’s body becomes something that can be demanded, compared, and reclaimed. The occupying force, the former lover, the man who now wants to build a life with her, and the society that can punish that same body in public all try, in different ways, to define a right over it.

Marie’s body becomes a battlefield for men—a field upon which occupation, desire, ownership, shame, and revenge all seek to leave their mark. The official war may be over, but the logic of possession continues.

Whenever Marie senses danger, she knows exactly what kind of story to construct in just a few words. The screenplay achieves its strongest verbal impact with minimal dialogue and information. Marie cannot be reduced to the simple binary of victim or perpetrator. She is wounded, but not passive; harmed, but capable of harming others to survive. This ethical complexity is one of the film’s strengths.

The film’s anger, too, does not constantly speak about itself. It is built through the house, clothes, the dinner table, doors, corridors, looks, and the characters’ control over their bodies.

Anger in cinema does not need to shout to exist.

Marie is intelligent, and her speech is unusually controlled, as if she has spent years silently writing possible answers and scenarios in her mind and now releases them drop by drop, without explanation. She controls not only language, but also her body, face, gaze, and reactions. This restraint separates her from the familiar image of the damaged woman.

Her wound has not turned into passivity; it has become a permanent state of readiness for survival. It is as if fighting has settled into her skin and flesh, and at times her body recognizes danger before her mind does.

But Marie’s body cannot hide what her language can. The way she walks, dresses, washes herself, the sudden contractions of her body, and the care with which she moves turn her body into an archive of war. Her pain is not localized. It is as if rage, humiliation, forced sex, pregnancy, difficult childbirth, loss, and the years in which she had to hold herself together to survive have all remained inside her body.

She can remove the past from her language, but her body still remembers it.

Morphine belongs to the same logic. For me, Marie’s three years of receiving morphine are not a minor medical detail; they show that her body, too, has become dependent on this new life. She does not only need the house and financial security; she needs something that can make the pain in her body bearable. Her previous doctor apparently saw no need to make her give a long medical history or undergo a new examination every time. Marie came, received morphine, and left.

Some pain shows in the face, the gaze, the walk, and the body's contraction before a patient ever explains it. It is as if the doctor understood something in Marie that didn't need explaining. Her pain was not a localized symptom; her entire body carried it.

When that same doctor is killed, the film presents his death in the same compressed language: a few images, a disturbed room, chairs knocked out of order, and then it is over. His disappearance is not simply the removal of a minor character from Marie’s life; it is the loss of one of the few people who had seen her pain without judging it. War does not wound only through bullets, executions, and destruction; sometimes it removes a doctor, and years later the pain of the patient he once soothed remains.

Throughout all of this, Marie is constructing a new identity for herself. She does not simply want to survive; she wants no longer to be the woman she once was. She does not want to be a worker, someone who is always given orders; she wants to be the one who gives them. That is why even the moment when she gives a new instruction about her breakfast carries, for me, a significance beyond an everyday act. She is testing her new position. The house, clothes, bed, man, servant, food, and order are all parts of the identity she is trying to build.

And yet the servant’s uniform sometimes becomes a kind of shelter for her. In moments of danger, the identity she wants to leave behind can become a disguise and a form of protection again. Marie wants to separate herself from her former class position, but she still knows how to disappear inside that identity.

Even social identity in this film is not fixed; it is a garment that can be put on or removed to survive.

The same is true of memory. Marie does not merely hide the past to survive; she turns forgetting into a way of life. When she tells the little girl to “draw a curtain” over certain thoughts, it seems like advice meant to comfort a child, but she is passing her own survival mechanism on to the next generation: if something is too painful, put it behind a curtain. Do not look. Do not think. Continue.

But the film repeatedly shows that drawing a curtain does not make something disappear.

The architecture reflects this as well. Corridors, doors, and glass are not simply production-design elements. Marie is repeatedly seen behind glass, within enclosed frames, or in spaces that partially conceal her presence. Frosted glass lets the body be seen without fully clarifying identity. She is both present and erased.

This visual quality approaches the meaning of the film’s title itself: a woman who exists, but whose identity must remain unknown.

By contrast, whenever a mirror or a more transparent surface appears, the question of identity becomes more direct. By the end, the contrast between the frosted glass and the clearer mirror image becomes especially important, as if after hours of hiding Marie behind semi-transparent surfaces, the film forces her, if only for a moment, to confront a clearer image of herself.

The SS mark on the door is one of the screenplay’s most precise devices for revealing Marie's relationship with the woman next door. From that moment onward, the mark becomes something both women want to push away from themselves. In a short exchange, Marie suggests that there may have been a mistake and refers to a “woman.” The neighbour immediately replies that she never said it was a woman, and that perhaps they meant a man.

At that moment, Marie considers the precarious position of her factory-owner fiancé and almost immediately finds a narrative that she recounts in the following scene to the head servant, with such composure and precision that it sounds as if she has known this truth for years. That single short exchange is enough to expose the hidden structure of the relationship. Marie has unintentionally revealed something, and the neighbour understands it. Marie, in turn, realizes in the same moment that the neighbour’s true target is Marie herself.

From this point on, SS is no longer merely a sign on a door; it stands between these two women.

In fact, SS begins a duel—a duel between two unknown women.

The neighbour is intelligent, educated, and socially more powerful, and she seems to believe that she controls the situation. But she underestimates something about Marie: her survival intelligence.

In a fraction of a second, Marie reads the situation, takes the narrative out of the other woman’s hands, redirects the accusation, and, before she herself becomes the victim of the sign on the door, places another woman in her position. This is one of the screenplay’s strongest moments because it shows that war has not only wounded Marie’s body; it has also changed how fast she thinks. She has learned to decide before the other person does, to construct someone else’s story before they can define hers, and to choose someone else before she herself is chosen.

The war is over, but its logic is still alive inside her.

More than fear drives this decision; class anger does, too. The neighbour is not merely a threat to Marie, but an image of a woman who has been able to move through the same past more safely. She has had more money, more security, a better house, and more opportunity to keep her past hidden.

Perhaps somewhere in the deepest part of Marie’s mind lies the question of why she alone should have to pay, and why her past must remain inscribed on her body while the other woman’s past can remain protected behind the walls of a beautiful home.

From this perspective, what Marie does is not simply self-defence; it is the transfer of violence. Violence born from war passes through class difference and is now transferred from one woman to another.

After the news of the neighbour’s death, the film’s visual language reaches its peak for me. Marie’s first reaction is to think of the woman’s child. She suggests that perhaps they could take the child and raise her. This is not merely a maternal response; it is an attempt at compensation, as if Marie’s mind is trying to create a balance between what has been taken and what might still be given back. If the mother is gone, perhaps the child can be saved.

But the film refuses to let this moral account close so easily. The camera changes position and begins to watch Marie as if from the dead woman’s house, through windows and several layers of glass. This is one of the film’s most beautiful cinematographic decisions. Suddenly, it feels as though the dead woman is still present, or perhaps Marie’s conscience has taken her place.

Marie moves through the house, turns off the lights, puts on her nightgown, and uses her morphine—perfectly ordinary actions, yet nothing feels ordinary anymore because the point of view has changed. We are looking from a place that has become empty, from the house of a woman who no longer exists.

The film then moves into the scene in which Marie sleeps with her fiancé. She is so absorbed in staring beyond the window that her physical pain seems, for a moment, to recede; her face becomes almost like an icy statue. Sex cannot separate her from the dead woman either. We feel the movement of the bed; Marie’s body is in the present, but her face and gaze remain fixed on the same wall and the same exterior space. She is beside a man who is part of the identity she has built for herself, inside the house she has fought to preserve, yet even in the most private moment of her body, the past is watching her from behind the wall.

Then comes one of the film’s most powerful sequences: a striking performative scene of hair cutting and scissors.

The movement of the bed, the sounds of bodies, and the sound of scissors draw closer together through editing and sound design. Sex, guilt, humiliation, and punishment no longer belong to four separate experiences; they occupy the same sensory plane. Earlier, the film compressed history. Now it stretches out a woman's punishment.

Cut to the second woman: to hair being cut for longer this time, to a woman who holds herself together for longer, breaks several times, cries, and then gathers herself again. For me, this second woman is the symbolic image of the neighbour. It is as though, to endure what she has done, Marie imagines the punishment she herself once feared being inflicted on the other woman instead: she, too, must have had a share in this punishment; she, too, had hidden something; she, too, was not entirely outside this history.

Perhaps this is not the truth, but perhaps it is a truth Marie needs to keep living.

All of this takes place in a film that reduces almost everything to a minimum. Dialogue is sparse, clothes are few, objects are limited, information remains half-hidden, and the production design is tightly controlled. Yet this minimalism does not empty the film’s world. On the contrary, every remaining element becomes more heavily charged. A piano, a white dress in an empty room, a vial of morphine, a breakfast plate, a window, a pair of scissors, a servant’s uniform, and a mark on a door each carry part of the film’s history and character.

For me, this is the real power of cinematic language.

El-Toukhy tells one of the twentieth century’s deepest wounds through the smallest possible elements. She does not shout history; she places it in silence, in the body, and in the distance between two houses, forcing the viewer to see it.

In the end, the title Woman Unknown expands in meaning, too. Which woman is unknown? Marie? The neighbour? The first woman whose hair is cut in the street? Or the second woman who remains standing until the very end?

Perhaps all of them.

Women whose names history never recorded, while history was recorded on their bodies. The unknown woman may be someone condemned before she was ever truly known.

And perhaps the man and Marie are also two different responses to the same wound. To escape loss, he preserves part of the past and rewrites another part for his daughter. To escape pain, Marie erases her own past and constructs a new identity. One turns the house into a place where loss is preserved and memory reconstructed; the other wants to turn that same house into the site of her own rebirth.

But neither is truly free. The past, whether you preserve it, rewrite it, or try to erase it, finds a way back: in a white dress that even the tailor has shortened for a new body, in a familiar face, in a vial of morphine, in a servant’s uniform, in a gaze through glass, in the movement of a bed, in the sound of scissors, and in a body that still remembers.

Woman Unknown, for me, is not a film about the end of war. Still, about its continuation—about the moment when the soldiers have gone, the flags have changed, the streets have grown quiet, people marry, build homes, and life appears from the outside to have returned to normal, while in some bodies the war is still going on.

History says it is over.

The body still does not believe it.